


Picking Up The Pieces

by aleberg9



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Acquisition of Children, Adoption, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Multi, Parent Vesemir (The Witcher), Past Child Abuse, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:40:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24085246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aleberg9/pseuds/aleberg9
Summary: Vesemir did not plan on becoming a father. He wanted a quiet life in the country.Instead he gets three sons.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 99





	Picking Up The Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on some Head-canons I found floating around Tumblr - basically what would happen if Vesemir adopted Geralt, Eskel, and Lambert.
> 
> Warnings for talk of child abuse and its after affects

Vesemir is not quite sure what it is that prompts him to adopt Geralt.

He was childhood friends with Visenna, his mother, and even officiated at the wedding when she got married to Geralt’s father.

But then he was deployed and by the time he got back five years and several tours of duty later he had fallen out of touch. He did hear it though, when Visenna’s drug problem got worse. And he heard it when her husband left her pregnant and without any kind of support to speak of. He heard when nine months later little Geralt was born and he was even sent a picture, of a round faced baby with a light tuft of hair.

After that he heard nothing.

At least not until he returned home and learned that shortly after giving birth Visenna had had some form of panic attack and had left Geralt on the doorstep of an orphanage. Visenna’s sister, Carina, was the only one still in contact with her at that point and even she didn’t know where Visenna had gone.

No one knew where Geralt was.

He had stayed half a year in the orphanage, but babies got adopted quick and he had been cute and well tempered to boot. Adoptions were anonymous.

Vesemir should have put it out of his head at that point. A child he had never met was non of his concern.

Vesemir had a job at a horse stable, and a part time gig teaching self defense classes in town. It was three years since he had come home, and life was finally starting to settle down.

Geralt would have been around five, had Vesemir bothered to think about such a thing.

He got a call from Carina.

Geralt had apparently come looking fo his mother. He had showed up at Carina’s house asking about Visenna and no matter what she said she could not get the boy to come inside and when she starting asking questions he took off like a startled horse and disappeared. She had called the local sheriff’s office but everyone knew their track record was something less than stellar.

Vesemir sighed. He did not need this.

He took out the little folded picture of baby Geralt. He never understood why he kept it. Overseas he had gotten so few pictures from home it had become a little memento to take out during bad nights. Now it mostly sat in his wallet because he had gotten so used to carrying it he hardly thought about it.

Once upon a time, Visenna had been his best friend. They had been inseparable, before his career and her drug addiction tore them apart. There was a time he would have considered himself Geralt’s godfather, and would have happily helped raise the boy.

Carina had said that the boy looked underfed, and there had been scrapes on his knuckles and bruises on his arms. Shadows like warning signs under his eyes.

Before the military, Vesemir had been a detective in the city. He still had connections.

He poured himself a coffee and picked up the phone. Time to make some calls.

It took him three years to find Geralt.

Half of the problem was the adoption system which lost more documents than it saved and was a nightmare of underfunded bureaucracy.

The other half of the problem was that Geralt kept running away.

Since he was still so young, he wasn’t very good at it. He would get picked up by police and Vesemir would catch a glimpse of him before the boy vanished once more into one more foster home.

In three years the boy was moved between five different states and twice as many homes.

Vesemir never gave up.

Geralt was eight when Vesemir finally found him, and fought the courts for another three months before he was granted custody.

Some time during the intervening years, Geralt had lost all pigment, from stress or as a late side affect of his mother’s drug addiction, and his hair had turned a shocking shade of white and his skin had grown pale.

His eyes were older than they had a right to be, but they still shone with the same startling shade of almost gold that Vesemir remembered from his photograph.

When Vesemir returned home with Geralt for the first time, he knew he was in over his head.

Despite being over fifty, he had no children of his own, and very little experience.

In the end it was the horses who saved the boy. Geralt took to them like a fish to water. In those first painful months when Vesemir couldn’t get a single word out of Geralt, the horses are the only thing which Vesemir could find that would bring the boy out of his shell.

Its a miracle beyond count that his boss doesn’t mind an eight year old boy running around his stables, because in no time Geralt has taken over a wide range of chores.

Perched on a ladder, he brushes the horses with a focus that Vesemir has never known a child to possess.

Geralt’s favorite horse, by far, is a fierce young mare who was rescued from a meat farm. She is as likely to bite and kick as let you approach, but around Geralt she turns into the mildest mannered horse imaginable. 

The first time Geralt speaks, it is to inform Vesemir that the horse’s name is Roach. Technically, her name is Martha but Geralt doesn’t care.

Vesemir changes the sign by her stall to read Roach.

The next boy he adopts is Eskel.

He had no intention of adopting another one. Geralt was turning into quite the hellion and was more than enough trouble on his own, thank you very much.

But then an old colleague of Vesemir and his wife die in a car crash and leave a ten year old boy with no living family.

Vesemir shows up for the funeral and leaves with a second son.

A year older than Geralt, Eskel is quiet and mature and helps out around the house without complaint. In fact, he helps out a little too willingly, and Vesemir quickly figures out that Eskel blames himself for his parent’s death and is trying too hard to be useful because he fears that Vesemir will leave him as well.

Vesemir is at a loss as to what to do, but Geralt latches unto Eskel like a barnacle to a rock. Somehow the two of them cause more trouble then should be humanly possible and come home covered in scrapes and bruises but Vesemir finds them curled together during bad nights and Eskel pulls Geralt out of himself when he disappears into his head and Geralt picks up the pieces when Eskel runs himself ragged.

A year later and Vesemir’s boys come home grim faced and scowling. They have been attending the local elementary school to mixed success. Luckily he was able to enroll them in the same class, but he gets weekly reports from teachers alternately praising their intelligence and bemoaning their very existence.

Geralt still sometimes panics and Vesemir has to be called to bring him home. The one time he didn’t pick up the phone Geralt tried to walk home by himself.

Vesemir listens intently as his boys tell him about a kid, two years younger, who shows up covered in bruises he hides under too big clothing and who growls and spits when you get too close to him on the playground and whose dad forgets to pick him up sometimes.

The boys name is Lambert and his father owns the local mine. His father also has three restraining orders on him, five arrests for domestic abuse that never got persecuted and list of DUIs longer than Vesemir is tall.

After the boys go to bed, Vesemir pours himself a very stiff drink. He does not need to get involved.

Lambert is a small boy with dark hair and dark eyes and a scowl to match a thundercloud.

When Vesemir first meets him he throws insults at him that would have made his comrades in the army blush.

Vesemir starts the adoption process the second that he gets the say so from Lambert.

The house he lives in behind the stables is not meant for three boys, but Vesemir builds an addition over the summer while his boys run like shirtless demons through the fields, screaming and laughing until they come in pink skinned from the sun and collapse in a pile for the night.

Vesemir never considered becoming a father. It figurers that, in the end, he should end up with three sons.

Sons who cause his heart to break when they wake screaming from nightmares or shatter into a panic attack from a wrong movement or work themselves to the bone trying to make his family stay. But sons who fill him with a nameless, boundless joy as well. A pride so fierce he could suffocate on it, when he sees their wild boundless energy, their intelligence, and their kindness.

Vesemir thinks that even if he has to change the very structure of the universe itself, he will see that his children have the life that they deserve.


End file.
